its
continuity; here within, the battles and the glories, the thoughts, the
theories and the speculations of the past for Michael and Alan moved
across printed pages under the rich lamplight.

Dinner dissolved the concentrated spell of two hours. But dinner at 99
St. Giles was very delightful in the sea-green dining-room whose
decorations had survived the departing tenant who created them. Michael
and Alan did not talk much; indeed, such conversation as took place
during the meal came from the landlady. She possessed so deft a capacity
for making apparently the most barren observations flower and fruit with
intricate narrations, that merely an inquiry as to the merit of the
lemon-sole would serve to link the occasion with an intimate revelation
of her domestic past.

After dinner Michael and Alan read on toward eleven o'clock, at which
hour Alan usually went to bed. It was after his departure that in a way
Michael enjoyed the night most. The mediaeval chronicles were put back on
their shelf; Stubbs or Lingard, Froude, Freeman, Guizot, Lavisse or
Gregorovius were put back; round the warm and silent room Michael
wandered uncertain for a while; and at the end of five minutes down came
Don Quixote or Adlington's Apuleius, or Florio's Montaigne, or Lucian's
True History. The fire crumbled away to ashes and powder; the fog stole
into the room; outside was now nothing but the chimes at their measured
intervals, nothing but the noise of them to say a city was there; at
that hour Oxford was truly austere, something more indeed than austere,
for it was neither in time nor in space, but the abstraction of a city.
Only when the lamps began to reek did Michael go up to bed by
candlelight. In his vaporous room, through whose open window the sound
of two o'clock striking came very coldly, he could scarcely fancy
himself in the present. The effort of intense reading, whether of bygone
institutions or of past adventure, had left him in the condition of
physical freedom that saints achieve by prayer. He was aware of nothing
but a desire to stay forever like this, half feverish with the triumph
of tremendous concentration, to undress in this stinging acerbity of
night air, and to lie wakeful for a long time in this world of dreaming
spires.

99 St. Giles exercised just that industrious charm which Michael had
anticipated from the situation. The old house overlooked such a wide
thoroughfare that the view, while it afforded the repose of